You're probably more of a project finisher than a project starter
Many of my open tabs are write-ups of topics that I hope to learn about some day, but I have not returned to in years since opening (cumulatively 1000+)
Many of my open tabs are write-ups of topics that I hope to learn about some day, but I have not returned to in years since opening (cumulatively 1000+)
My "workflow" usually consists of: open new window for the topic/theme (whatever it may be, research, study, reading news) and go opening tabs, searches, articles. When I get to a point where a window hasn't been active for a few days I close the useless/uninteresting tabs and save the rest as a collection in Toby.
It's been extremely helpful to manage my fear of missing knowledge or closing something I could get interested, the curation after a few days really helps.
I use Sidebery to classify my dozens of dormant tabs, but the net weekly balance is a few tabs positive because I've become less selective with this power.
My PC has 64Gb of RAM.
Why should I ever have to close a tab if I'm not ready to?
Its probably the same case if you have thousands of tabs and mechanisms to hide them, but maybe 30 tabs or so spread across a few windows gets crowded, your forced to prune them regularly, either by doing the thing you had the tab open for or deciding its not worth your time right now.
I wish there was something better, but I've never found it.
As I said above, this is how I work, and it's not negotiable. If it bothers you to have that many tabs open, then fine, kill off your tabs. That's fine with me. And my way should be fine with you. (You're probably one of those persnickety inbox zero people, too :-), aren't you?) (My Inbox has 38K unread messages, and I reset them at the start of the year. That's after the many thousands that Google already threw away. It's just not worth the effort to throw away all that stuff one message at a time...)
BTW, I have probably 100K bookmarks, but have no good way to merge multiple old bookmarks files and convert them to the new format, so unlike the tabs, the bookmarks are now useless. I stopped using bookmarks in favor of tabs years ago now.
Now let's talk about power tools for handling large numbers of tabs!